Dynamic Self-organization in an Open Reaction Network as the Fundamental Principle for the Emergence of Life

The emergence of life on the earth has attracted intense attention but still remained an unsolved question. A key problem is that it has been left unclear why a living organism can have self-organizing ability leading to highly ordered structures and evolutionary behavior. This work reveals by computer simulation and experiments that a stationary state of an open reaction network really has such self-organizing ability. The point is that reaction and diffusion processes are irreversible and always forced to approach equilibrium. Therefore, a network of such irreversible processes necessarily reaches a fully-balanced stationary state and moreover a stationary state thus formed is firmly stabilized by them and kept stable against fluctuation, namely it has self-organizing ability. Dynamic self-organization revealed in this work is realized with no special mechanism such as autocatalysis and can act as the fundamental principle of evolution toward highly ordered structures and the emergence of life.